Lawsuit asks FBI to release Sarasota 9/11 documents

Prestancia's 4224 Escondito Circle, located in a south Sarasota gated community. Investigators believe a Saudi family living there in 2001 had possible connections to hijacker pilots from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Published: Tuesday, September 10, 2013 at 3:45 p.m.

Last Modified: Tuesday, September 10, 2013 at 10:27 p.m.

Twelve years after the 9/11 attacks that included three hijacker pilots trained in Venice, the terrorists' alleged interaction with a high-echelon Saudi family that lived in Sarasota remains shrouded in secrecy.

Facts

ONLINE EXTRAS

But Sunshine law and Freedom of Information Act requests filed by an independent South Florida news organization have chipped away at the FBI's position that information related to the family remain secret.

Depending on how a federal judge in Broward County rules, the FBI could, theoretically, be compelled to reveal documents and field notes in the case.

Broward Bulldog editor Dan Christensen and former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham say the documents could shed light on how the locally trained terrorists were managed and supported.

Graham, former Florida governor and a co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, a Congressional body that investigated the attacks, believes the FBI has covered up Saudi support of the terrorists.

Graham also chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee during and after 9/11. He has chimed in on the ongoing federal lawsuit by the Broward Bulldog against the FBI and the Department of Justice, filing a 15-page declaration of the facts as he knows them.

The former senator wants more disclosure about what happened in Sarasota because he feels it may add to a bigger, largely censored subject: Who financed and supported the 9/11 terror attacks?

"It is a big onion, which is being slowly peeled," Graham told the Herald-Tribune. "We are continuing with all the means that are still available to us to get this material into the hands of the public."

"And the FBI is aggressively resisting the release of any additional documents," he said. "The question is, why are they doing this? What interest does the FBI have in denying the existence of its own documents?"

"Beyond that, they have thrown a blanket of national security over virtually everything, and why are they doing that for an event that occurred, soon to be, 12 years ago?"

Larry Berberich -- a man who played a pivotal security role at Sarasota's Prestancia neighorhood, where the Saudis in question lived at the time -- has his own view of what Graham describes as a blanket.

"Some of the local departments knew a hell of a lot about what was going on and were feeding the FBI that information," said Berberich, who was then a Prestancia board member nominally in charge of security and an unpaid security consultant to the sheriff at that time, Bill Balkwill.

Shortly after local law enforcement entered the vacated home of the Saudis in Prestancia, he said, "everything went black."

Berberich told the Herald-Tribune local law enforcement personnel privy to evidence were muzzled.

He declined to elaborate.

The neighbors noticed

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush was visiting a school in Sarasota.

Then came the revelation that three of the hijackers learned to fly at Venice Airport.

The story about a family of Saudis who suddenly left their home in suburban Sarasota about two weeks before the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. -- leaving food on the counter, a dirty diaper, three vehicles and an empty safe -- went unreported.

But it did not go unnoticed by neighbors.

The house was owned by Esam Ghazzawi, a well-connected businessman whose family had a long history with Saudi Arabia's royal family.

In the year leading up to 9/11, the Ghazzawi property at 4224 Escondito Circle was home to the patriarch's daughter and son-in-law, Anoud and Abdulaziz al-Hijji. The man was a college student here, and he and his wife had small children.

The couple's Saudi nationality, the trash they left at the curb, and the cars they left in the driveway created a hubbub in the staid gated community. Acting on tips from neighbors, law enforcement swept into the home within weeks after the terror attacks and confiscated boxes of potential evidence.

The incident was forgotten until it showed up in research by authors Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, as they were collecting material for their Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, "The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11."

Summers had interviewed a still-unnamed counterterrorism officer who told him that the FBI knew much more than it was saying about Prestancia.

With the 10th anniversary of 9/11 then approaching, Summers asked Christensen, a former Miami Herald investigative reporter and Broward Bulldog's editor, to help develop the Sarasota angle of the story.

From that interview and others, Summers and Christensen described alleged connections between the terrorists who learned to fly in Venice and the residents of the 3,300-square-foot home in Prestancia.

Just 15 miles separated the neighborhood and Venice Airport, where hijackers trained before piloting two jets into the World Trade Center and a third into a Pennsylvania field after passengers overtook them.

Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi took flight lessons at the airport's former Huffman Aviation. Ziad Jarra took flight lessons at the neighboring Florida Flight Training Center.

Atta and al-Shehhi are believed to have flown jets into the twin towers. Jarra is believed to have been the pilot of United Flight 93, which went down in Pennsylvania amid a passenger uprising.

The men knew each other from Germany and were part of what is referred to in 9/11 literature as the "Hamburg cell."

"Phone records and the Prestancia gate records linked the house on Escondito Circle to the hijackers," the Broward Bulldog reported in its 10th anniversary story.

Those findings were published not just on Christensen's Bulldog website, but also in the Herald-Tribune, Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times in September 2011.

Within days, the FBI went on the defensive, stating that the agency had followed up on the "referenced Sarasota home and family" and interviewed family members and found no evidence connecting them to hijackers.

"The anonymous 'counterterrorism officer' cited in the article apparently was not an FBI agent and had no access to the facts and circumstances pertaining to the resolution of this lead, otherwise this person would know that this matter was resolved without any nexus to the 9/11 plot," wrote FBI special agent Steven E. Ibison, who was the supervisor of the Tampa field office.

FBI officials in Tampa declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing litigation.

That does not surprise Tom Julin, a Miami First Amendment attorney who is representing the Broward Bulldog.

"The FBI, I think, went out of its way to discredit the initial reporting that Dan and Tony Summers had done," Julin said.

The FBI's reaction prompted a Freedom of Information quest, which culminated in a lawsuit before federal District Court Judge William L. Zloch, a former University of Notre Dame quarterback appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan.

"Basically Dan was saying, 'If you are telling me I am wrong, show me the documents.'"

Gatekeeper's records

While the Saudi family's sudden departure was intriguing, the smoking gun in the Bulldog investigation was the allegation that agents discovered phone records and Prestancia gate records that linked the Escondito Circle house to the hijackers.

Prestancia has two gates, manned by security guards who noted license plate numbers of visitors, asked drivers their names and recorded what home they were visiting.

An FBI document released to Christensen in April suggests the agency did not hold on to the gate-keeper records.

But that seems unlikely, says Berberich, the former Prestancia Homeowners Association director.

Now a Manatee County resident, Berberich then lived in a 12,000-square-foot home overlooking Prestancia's golf course.

With a background in military electronics and top-secret clearances from years ago, it was Berberich who helped Sarasota County law enforcement officials enter the Escondito Circle home. He also instructed Prestancia employees to fully cooperate with federal officials.

On two occasions since, Berberich has gone back to the Prestancia guard shack where the visitor logs were kept, he said.

"You've got records before that time, and records after that time," said Berberich, now 75. "There is a gap at the time in question. So that substantiates that it got turned over to somebody."

In his declaration to the federal court in the Broward Bulldog suit, Berberich described what he and law enforcement officials found in the home. "There was mail on the table, dirty diapers in one of the bathrooms," he said. "All of the toiletries were still in place." "The refrigerator was full of food as if the residents had just gone shopping before leaving."

"We also found a safe in the home had been emptied and it appeared that a computer had been removed," he said.

Berberich said that he had his eyes on the home before the terror attacks.

There were six or seven young men who visited on a regular basis. Vehicles later associated with the hijackers carried them to the gates of the country club community.

Their friendship with al-Hijji got them admitted, Berberich said.

He said he knows that because license plates associated with several vehicles now connected to the terrorists were recorded on numerous occasions by gate guards. The passengers said they were were headed for 4224 Escondito Circle.

"It was common for them to come into Prestancia, two, three in a car," Berberich said. "I mean, more than a person coming in a car, and more than one car coming in."

Strong ties

The Ghazzawi family has a decades-long history of operating at the highest levels of Saudi society, the Herald-Tribune has found.

As King Saud prepared for a state visit with President Dwight Eisenhower, Abbas Ghazzawi, who appears to be Esam Ghazzawi's father, was part of the royal entourage.

In exchange for being able to keep a U.S. military base within Saudi Arabia's borders, President Eisenhower agreed to allow the Saudi government to buy up to $500 million worth of U.S.-made arms.

The deal did not come together overnight, and Abbas Ghazzawi flew to New York, from Madrid, on Jan. 25, 1957, according to passenger lists kept by U.S. officials.

The elder Ghazzawi was accompanied by three other Saudis, including a man who would later serve as Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the U.S., Faisal al-Hegelan.

The Ghazzawi family's ties to America grew stronger years later when, in 1970, 17-year-old Esam Ghazzawi married American Deborah G. Browning.

Esam Ghazzawi's family later established a presence in Southwest Florida, building a home on Longboat Key's Putter Lane.

Esam and Deborah Ghazzawi bought the Prestancia home in September 1995, records show. Five months later, their daughter Anoud married Abdulaziz al-Hijji. He was 19 and she was 17, their Sarasota County marriage license shows.

Al-Hijji attended Manatee Community College, now State College of Florida, and then the University of South Florida, where he received a bachelor's.

Friends

Abdulaziz al-Hijji knew some of the terrorists who were in training at Venice Airport, according to a former friend who provided the information to an FBI agent and a Sarasota County Sheriff's Office detective in 2004.

The informant, a Sarasota cellphone store owner named Wissam Hammoud, made the claim while awaiting trial in the Hillsborough County Jail on federal charges. He is now serving a 21-year sentence in federal prison after pleading guilty in August 2005 to charges of plotting to kill a federal agent and a confidential informant.

Through the U.S. Attorney's Office, Hammoud arranged to be interviewed by Sarasota sheriff's Detective Michael Otis and FBI agent Leo Martinez, who worked in the agency's Fort Myers field office, according to a 2004 investigative report file by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Christensen obtained that document through a Sunshine law request made in late 2011 after the FBI attempted to discredit his story.

Hammoud told investigators that he met Abdulaziz al-Hijji through his own relatives in Sarasota in 1996. Hammoud described al-Hijji as very well schooled in Islam, the FDLE report states.

Hammoud said that Abdulaziz al-Hijji told him that al-Hijji's wife, Anoud, had family that provided her with money, but that her husband received none from his wife.

Hammoud told investigators that he often exercised with Abdulaziz al-Hijji at the Shapes Fitness center near the Prestancia neighborhood, and that the two played soccer together on property surrounding a Sarasota mosque.

Al-Hijji brought a friend to the games who Hammoud claimed was Adnan El Shukrijumah, a man who was federally indicted in 2010 for his alleged role in a terrorist plot to attack New York City's subway system. The FBI is currently offering a $5 million reward for information leading to El Shukrijumah's capture, and he is listed by the FBI as being one of the "most wanted terrorists."

The plot, uncovered in September 2009, was directed by senior Al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan, and El Shukrijumah is thought to have been part of the group's external operations hierarchy, according to an FBI-issued "Wanted" poster.

In an interview with the London Telegraph in February 2012, al-Hijji emphatically denied any connection to hijackers, stating that he loved America.

Al-Hijji acknowledged knowing Hammoud, but said the name "Shukrajumah" did not ring a bell.

Hammoud told investigators that he helped Abdulaziz and Anoud al-Hijji by clearing the residence on Escondito Circle after they left Sarasota, putting their belongings in storage. He said he was asked to sell one of al-Hijji's vehicles, a Volkswagen Beetle, and send the couple the proceeds.

Hammoud told investigators al-Hijji had gone to work for the Saudi-owned oil company Aramco. After leaving the U.S. in August 2001, al-Hijji went to Saudi Arabia first, and was later transferred to an Aramco office in London, the FDLE 2004 report states.

New pages

It took much longer for the FBI to give Christensen any real information about 9/11 and its potential relationship with Sarasota family.

This spring, with no explanation, the FBI mailed Christensen 31 pages of heavily redacted documents.

One of them, dated April 2002, appears to contradict the FBI's claim that there was no connection between the Prestancia family and hijackers.

The document states, "Further investigation of the (name deleted) family revealed many connections between the (name deleted) and individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 09/11/2001. More specifically, a (name deleted) family member (name deleted) also known as (name deleted) DOB (date deleted) last known address (address deleted) Florida, was a flight student at Huffman Aviation."

The agency redacted many of the names in the 31 pages released under exemptions that protect people's names in law enforcement records. But it is clear who the subjects are because the documents specifically cite the al-Hijjis' residence on Escondito Circle.

To Christensen, the statement was a breakthrough in his quest for documents.

"It is important because it establishes that there were connections between these people and the hijackers," Christensen said. "It says it very clearly, and it is also at odds with what the FBI has said before."

Graham, the former senator and co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, made his sworn declaration in Broward Bulldog's lawsuit after that document surfaced and referenced it in his own highly detailed report to the court.

"Once the FBI had found 'many connections' between the persons under investigation and individuals associated with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the FBI should have taken statements from all persons who knew those persons, should have obtained the gatehouse records of the Prestancia subdivision where 4224 Escondito Circle is located, should have compared the license plates on vehicles that the FBI had reason to believe that the terrorists used with photographs that were taken of license tags that passed through the Prestancia gatehouse, should have obtained financial records showing how homeowners' association fees were paid, and should have created inventories of property taken from the home, at a minimum," Graham wrote the court. "I have further been advised that the request specified that the activities involve apparent visits to that address by some of the decreased 9/11 hijackers."

Graham's 15-page declaration is accompanied by the entire 9/11 Commission report and by the "Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001," which is the work of the joint Congressional committee that Graham chaired.

Since the Joint Inquiry report was published in 2003, Graham has been trying within two presidential administrations to make public the chapter on how the terrorists were financed and supported.

In a guest editorial published by the Huffington Post in September 2012, Graham was more explicit about the contents of the censored chapter.

"Sadly, those 28 pages represent only a fraction of the evidence of Saudi complicity that our government continues to shield from the public, under a flawed classification program which appears to be part of a systematic effort to protect Saudi Arabia from any real accountability for its actions," Graham wrote.

The search goes on

In June, Judge Zloch denied a request by an assistant U.S. attorney representing the FBI to dismiss the Broward Bulldog's Freedom-of-Information-Act case.

Then Zloch invited Julin, Christensen's attorney, to tell the court exactly how he would recommend that the FBI proceed to do a better search for the materials that were being sought.

Julin's 15-page report asks the agency to use its "Sentinel system" to conduct searches, on top of the antiquated system that the agency used to generate the limited results turned over to the plaintiffs so far.

Launched in March 2012 at a cost of $450 million, Sentinel is a case management system aimed at replacing a hodgepodge of older FBI digital and paper processes. It is supposed to help FBI agents to collaborate and connect the dots more easily during investigations.

The Miami lawyer also asked for a manual review of the Tampa files on the case, which are voluminous.

He also asked for a series of test searches that the FBI apparently did not use previously that he said could produce results.

For example, Julin suggested trying the names of the family that owned the home -- the Ghazzawis -- and the names of the house's residents, the al-Hijjis.

He suggested the agency get a little more creative, trying searches like "Prestancia and gatehouse," "Prestancia and Mohamed Atta," "Escondito and Mohamed Atta," "Prestancia and Huffman Aviation," and so on.

The agent in charge of the Sarasota investigation, Gregory Sheffield, has since been reassigned to the FBI's Honolulu field office.

Julin asked that the FBI be compelled to ask Sheffield basic questions about his knowledge of the evidentiary files and where they are, and then to follow up on those leads.

Should Judge Zloch follow Julin's suggestions on how to proceed, there is the potential for opening up thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of new documents held in the FBI's Tampa field office, according to one of the responses filed by FBI's representative in the suit, Assistant U.S. Attorney Carole Fernandez.

In August, as part of Fernandez's reasoning for blocking the release of documents, she told the court:

"The FBI's Tampa office alone has more than 15,352 documents (serials) which together contain, potentially, hundreds of thousands of pages of records related to the 9/11 investigation," the federal attorney. "The manual review which plaintiffs are requesting is not reasonable, nor is it warranted."

<p>Twelve years after the 9/11 attacks that included three hijacker pilots trained in Venice, the terrorists' alleged interaction with a high-echelon Saudi family that lived in Sarasota remains shrouded in secrecy.</p><p>But Sunshine law and Freedom of Information Act requests filed by an independent South Florida news organization have chipped away at the FBI's position that information related to the family remain secret.</p><p>Depending on how a federal judge in Broward County rules, the FBI could, theoretically, be compelled to reveal documents and field notes in the case.</p><p>Broward Bulldog editor Dan Christensen and former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham say the documents could shed light on how the locally trained terrorists were managed and supported.</p><p>Graham, former Florida governor and a co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, a Congressional body that investigated the attacks, believes the FBI has covered up Saudi support of the terrorists.</p><p>Graham also chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee during and after 9/11. He has chimed in on the ongoing federal lawsuit by the Broward Bulldog against the FBI and the Department of Justice, filing a 15-page declaration of the facts as he knows them.</p><p>The former senator wants more disclosure about what happened in Sarasota because he feels it may add to a bigger, largely censored subject: Who financed and supported the 9/11 terror attacks?</p><p>"It is a big onion, which is being slowly peeled," Graham told the Herald-Tribune. "We are continuing with all the means that are still available to us to get this material into the hands of the public."</p><p>"And the FBI is aggressively resisting the release of any additional documents," he said. "The question is, why are they doing this? What interest does the FBI have in denying the existence of its own documents?"</p><p>"Beyond that, they have thrown a blanket of national security over virtually everything, and why are they doing that for an event that occurred, soon to be, 12 years ago?"</p><p>Larry Berberich -- a man who played a pivotal security role at Sarasota's Prestancia neighorhood, where the Saudis in question lived at the time -- has his own view of what Graham describes as a blanket.</p><p>"Some of the local departments knew a hell of a lot about what was going on and were feeding the FBI that information," said Berberich, who was then a Prestancia board member nominally in charge of security and an unpaid security consultant to the sheriff at that time, Bill Balkwill.</p><p>Shortly after local law enforcement entered the vacated home of the Saudis in Prestancia, he said, "everything went black."</p><p>Berberich told the Herald-Tribune local law enforcement personnel privy to evidence were muzzled.</p><p>He declined to elaborate.</p><p><b>The neighbors noticed</b></p><p>At the time of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush was visiting a school in Sarasota.</p><p>Then came the revelation that three of the hijackers learned to fly at Venice Airport.</p><p>The story about a family of Saudis who suddenly left their home in suburban Sarasota about two weeks before the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. -- leaving food on the counter, a dirty diaper, three vehicles and an empty safe -- went unreported.</p><p>But it did not go unnoticed by neighbors.</p><p>The house was owned by Esam Ghazzawi, a well-connected businessman whose family had a long history with Saudi Arabia's royal family.</p><p>In the year leading up to 9/11, the Ghazzawi property at 4224 Escondito Circle was home to the patriarch's daughter and son-in-law, Anoud and Abdulaziz al-Hijji. The man was a college student here, and he and his wife had small children.</p><p>The couple's Saudi nationality, the trash they left at the curb, and the cars they left in the driveway created a hubbub in the staid gated community. Acting on tips from neighbors, law enforcement swept into the home within weeks after the terror attacks and confiscated boxes of potential evidence.</p><p>The incident was forgotten until it showed up in research by authors Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, as they were collecting material for their Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, "The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11."</p><p>Summers had interviewed a still-unnamed counterterrorism officer who told him that the FBI knew much more than it was saying about Prestancia.</p><p>With the 10th anniversary of 9/11 then approaching, Summers asked Christensen, a former Miami Herald investigative reporter and Broward Bulldog's editor, to help develop the Sarasota angle of the story.</p><p>From that interview and others, Summers and Christensen described alleged connections between the terrorists who learned to fly in Venice and the residents of the 3,300-square-foot home in Prestancia.</p><p>Just 15 miles separated the neighborhood and Venice Airport, where hijackers trained before piloting two jets into the World Trade Center and a third into a Pennsylvania field after passengers overtook them.</p><p>Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi took flight lessons at the airport's former Huffman Aviation. Ziad Jarra took flight lessons at the neighboring Florida Flight Training Center.</p><p>Atta and al-Shehhi are believed to have flown jets into the twin towers. Jarra is believed to have been the pilot of United Flight 93, which went down in Pennsylvania amid a passenger uprising.</p><p>The men knew each other from Germany and were part of what is referred to in 9/11 literature as the "Hamburg cell."</p><p>"Phone records and the Prestancia gate records linked the house on Escondito Circle to the hijackers," the Broward Bulldog reported in its 10th anniversary story.</p><p>Those findings were published not just on Christensen's Bulldog website, but also in the Herald-Tribune, Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times in September 2011.</p><p>Within days, the FBI went on the defensive, stating that the agency had followed up on the "referenced Sarasota home and family" and interviewed family members and found no evidence connecting them to hijackers.</p><p>"The anonymous 'counterterrorism officer' cited in the article apparently was not an FBI agent and had no access to the facts and circumstances pertaining to the resolution of this lead, otherwise this person would know that this matter was resolved without any nexus to the 9/11 plot," wrote FBI special agent Steven E. Ibison, who was the supervisor of the Tampa field office.</p><p>FBI officials in Tampa declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing litigation.</p><p>That does not surprise Tom Julin, a Miami First Amendment attorney who is representing the Broward Bulldog.</p><p>"The FBI, I think, went out of its way to discredit the initial reporting that Dan and Tony Summers had done," Julin said.</p><p>The FBI's reaction prompted a Freedom of Information quest, which culminated in a lawsuit before federal District Court Judge William L. Zloch, a former University of Notre Dame quarterback appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan.</p><p>"Basically Dan was saying, 'If you are telling me I am wrong, show me the documents.'"</p><p><b>Gatekeeper's records</b></p><p>While the Saudi family's sudden departure was intriguing, the smoking gun in the Bulldog investigation was the allegation that agents discovered phone records and Prestancia gate records that linked the Escondito Circle house to the hijackers.</p><p>Prestancia has two gates, manned by security guards who noted license plate numbers of visitors, asked drivers their names and recorded what home they were visiting.</p><p>An FBI document released to Christensen in April suggests the agency did not hold on to the gate-keeper records.</p><p>But that seems unlikely, says Berberich, the former Prestancia Homeowners Association director.</p><p>Now a Manatee County resident, Berberich then lived in a 12,000-square-foot home overlooking Prestancia's golf course.</p><p>With a background in military electronics and top-secret clearances from years ago, it was Berberich who helped Sarasota County law enforcement officials enter the Escondito Circle home. He also instructed Prestancia employees to fully cooperate with federal officials.</p><p>On two occasions since, Berberich has gone back to the Prestancia guard shack where the visitor logs were kept, he said.</p><p>"You've got records before that time, and records after that time," said Berberich, now 75. "There is a gap at the time in question. So that substantiates that it got turned over to somebody."</p><p>In his declaration to the federal court in the Broward Bulldog suit, Berberich described what he and law enforcement officials found in the home. "There was mail on the table, dirty diapers in one of the bathrooms," he said. "All of the toiletries were still in place." "The refrigerator was full of food as if the residents had just gone shopping before leaving."</p><p>"We also found a safe in the home had been emptied and it appeared that a computer had been removed," he said.</p><p>Berberich said that he had his eyes on the home before the terror attacks.</p><p>There were six or seven young men who visited on a regular basis. Vehicles later associated with the hijackers carried them to the gates of the country club community.</p><p>Their friendship with al-Hijji got them admitted, Berberich said.</p><p>He said he knows that because license plates associated with several vehicles now connected to the terrorists were recorded on numerous occasions by gate guards. The passengers said they were were headed for 4224 Escondito Circle.</p><p>"It was common for them to come into Prestancia, two, three in a car," Berberich said. "I mean, more than a person coming in a car, and more than one car coming in."</p><p><b>Strong ties</b></p><p>The Ghazzawi family has a decades-long history of operating at the highest levels of Saudi society, the Herald-Tribune has found.</p><p>As King Saud prepared for a state visit with President Dwight Eisenhower, Abbas Ghazzawi, who appears to be Esam Ghazzawi's father, was part of the royal entourage.</p><p>In exchange for being able to keep a U.S. military base within Saudi Arabia's borders, President Eisenhower agreed to allow the Saudi government to buy up to $500 million worth of U.S.-made arms.</p><p>The deal did not come together overnight, and Abbas Ghazzawi flew to New York, from Madrid, on Jan. 25, 1957, according to passenger lists kept by U.S. officials.</p><p>The elder Ghazzawi was accompanied by three other Saudis, including a man who would later serve as Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the U.S., Faisal al-Hegelan.</p><p>The Ghazzawi family's ties to America grew stronger years later when, in 1970, 17-year-old Esam Ghazzawi married American Deborah G. Browning.</p><p>Esam Ghazzawi's family later established a presence in Southwest Florida, building a home on Longboat Key's Putter Lane.</p><p>Esam and Deborah Ghazzawi bought the Prestancia home in September 1995, records show. Five months later, their daughter Anoud married Abdulaziz al-Hijji. He was 19 and she was 17, their Sarasota County marriage license shows.</p><p>Al-Hijji attended Manatee Community College, now State College of Florida, and then the University of South Florida, where he received a bachelor's.</p><p><b>Friends</b></p><p>Abdulaziz al-Hijji knew some of the terrorists who were in training at Venice Airport, according to a former friend who provided the information to an FBI agent and a Sarasota County Sheriff's Office detective in 2004.</p><p>The informant, a Sarasota cellphone store owner named Wissam Hammoud, made the claim while awaiting trial in the Hillsborough County Jail on federal charges. He is now serving a 21-year sentence in federal prison after pleading guilty in August 2005 to charges of plotting to kill a federal agent and a confidential informant.</p><p>Through the U.S. Attorney's Office, Hammoud arranged to be interviewed by Sarasota sheriff's Detective Michael Otis and FBI agent Leo Martinez, who worked in the agency's Fort Myers field office, according to a 2004 investigative report file by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.</p><p>Christensen obtained that document through a Sunshine law request made in late 2011 after the FBI attempted to discredit his story.</p><p>Hammoud told investigators that he met Abdulaziz al-Hijji through his own relatives in Sarasota in 1996. Hammoud described al-Hijji as very well schooled in Islam, the FDLE report states.</p><p>Hammoud said that Abdulaziz al-Hijji told him that al-Hijji's wife, Anoud, had family that provided her with money, but that her husband received none from his wife.</p><p>Hammoud told investigators that he often exercised with Abdulaziz al-Hijji at the Shapes Fitness center near the Prestancia neighborhood, and that the two played soccer together on property surrounding a Sarasota mosque.</p><p>Al-Hijji brought a friend to the games who Hammoud claimed was Adnan El Shukrijumah, a man who was federally indicted in 2010 for his alleged role in a terrorist plot to attack New York City's subway system. The FBI is currently offering a $5 million reward for information leading to El Shukrijumah's capture, and he is listed by the FBI as being one of the "most wanted terrorists."</p><p>The plot, uncovered in September 2009, was directed by senior Al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan, and El Shukrijumah is thought to have been part of the group's external operations hierarchy, according to an FBI-issued "Wanted" poster.</p><p>In an interview with the London Telegraph in February 2012, al-Hijji emphatically denied any connection to hijackers, stating that he loved America.</p><p>Al-Hijji acknowledged knowing Hammoud, but said the name "Shukrajumah" did not ring a bell.</p><p>Hammoud told investigators that he helped Abdulaziz and Anoud al-Hijji by clearing the residence on Escondito Circle after they left Sarasota, putting their belongings in storage. He said he was asked to sell one of al-Hijji's vehicles, a Volkswagen Beetle, and send the couple the proceeds.</p><p>Hammoud told investigators al-Hijji had gone to work for the Saudi-owned oil company Aramco. After leaving the U.S. in August 2001, al-Hijji went to Saudi Arabia first, and was later transferred to an Aramco office in London, the FDLE 2004 report states.</p><p><b>New pages</b></p><p>It took much longer for the FBI to give Christensen any real information about 9/11 and its potential relationship with Sarasota family.</p><p>This spring, with no explanation, the FBI mailed Christensen 31 pages of heavily redacted documents.</p><p>One of them, dated April 2002, appears to contradict the FBI's claim that there was no connection between the Prestancia family and hijackers.</p><p>The document states, "Further investigation of the (name deleted) family revealed many connections between the (name deleted) and individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 09/11/2001. More specifically, a (name deleted) family member (name deleted) also known as (name deleted) DOB (date deleted) last known address (address deleted) Florida, was a flight student at Huffman Aviation."</p><p>The agency redacted many of the names in the 31 pages released under exemptions that protect people's names in law enforcement records. But it is clear who the subjects are because the documents specifically cite the al-Hijjis' residence on Escondito Circle.</p><p>To Christensen, the statement was a breakthrough in his quest for documents.</p><p>"It is important because it establishes that there were connections between these people and the hijackers," Christensen said. "It says it very clearly, and it is also at odds with what the FBI has said before."</p><p>Graham, the former senator and co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, made his sworn declaration in Broward Bulldog's lawsuit after that document surfaced and referenced it in his own highly detailed report to the court.</p><p>"Once the FBI had found 'many connections' between the persons under investigation and individuals associated with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the FBI should have taken statements from all persons who knew those persons, should have obtained the gatehouse records of the Prestancia subdivision where 4224 Escondito Circle is located, should have compared the license plates on vehicles that the FBI had reason to believe that the terrorists used with photographs that were taken of license tags that passed through the Prestancia gatehouse, should have obtained financial records showing how homeowners' association fees were paid, and should have created inventories of property taken from the home, at a minimum," Graham wrote the court. "I have further been advised that the request specified that the activities involve apparent visits to that address by some of the decreased 9/11 hijackers."</p><p>Graham's 15-page declaration is accompanied by the entire 9/11 Commission report and by the "Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001," which is the work of the joint Congressional committee that Graham chaired.</p><p>Since the Joint Inquiry report was published in 2003, Graham has been trying within two presidential administrations to make public the chapter on how the terrorists were financed and supported.</p><p>In a guest editorial published by the Huffington Post in September 2012, Graham was more explicit about the contents of the censored chapter.</p><p>"Sadly, those 28 pages represent only a fraction of the evidence of Saudi complicity that our government continues to shield from the public, under a flawed classification program which appears to be part of a systematic effort to protect Saudi Arabia from any real accountability for its actions," Graham wrote.</p><p><b>The search goes on</b></p><p>In June, Judge Zloch denied a request by an assistant U.S. attorney representing the FBI to dismiss the Broward Bulldog's Freedom-of-Information-Act case.</p><p>Then Zloch invited Julin, Christensen's attorney, to tell the court exactly how he would recommend that the FBI proceed to do a better search for the materials that were being sought.</p><p>Julin's 15-page report asks the agency to use its "Sentinel system" to conduct searches, on top of the antiquated system that the agency used to generate the limited results turned over to the plaintiffs so far.</p><p>Launched in March 2012 at a cost of $450 million, Sentinel is a case management system aimed at replacing a hodgepodge of older FBI digital and paper processes. It is supposed to help FBI agents to collaborate and connect the dots more easily during investigations.</p><p>The Miami lawyer also asked for a manual review of the Tampa files on the case, which are voluminous.</p><p>He also asked for a series of test searches that the FBI apparently did not use previously that he said could produce results.</p><p>For example, Julin suggested trying the names of the family that owned the home -- the Ghazzawis -- and the names of the house's residents, the al-Hijjis.</p><p>He suggested the agency get a little more creative, trying searches like "Prestancia and gatehouse," "Prestancia and Mohamed Atta," "Escondito and Mohamed Atta," "Prestancia and Huffman Aviation," and so on.</p><p>The agent in charge of the Sarasota investigation, Gregory Sheffield, has since been reassigned to the FBI's Honolulu field office.</p><p>Julin asked that the FBI be compelled to ask Sheffield basic questions about his knowledge of the evidentiary files and where they are, and then to follow up on those leads.</p><p>Should Judge Zloch follow Julin's suggestions on how to proceed, there is the potential for opening up thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of new documents held in the FBI's Tampa field office, according to one of the responses filed by FBI's representative in the suit, Assistant U.S. Attorney Carole Fernandez.</p><p>In August, as part of Fernandez's reasoning for blocking the release of documents, she told the court:</p><p>"The FBI's Tampa office alone has more than 15,352 documents (serials) which together contain, potentially, hundreds of thousands of pages of records related to the 9/11 investigation," the federal attorney. "The manual review which plaintiffs are requesting is not reasonable, nor is it warranted."</p>